music

half of the criteria by which one judges a coffee shop, at least in my mind, is its music. the coffee matters, but even a good cup of coffee can go sour if you're trying to read Wallace Stevens to Alanis Morissette's "Isn't It Ironic?"

I can appreciate working to a little bach or brahms... beethoven or any of the other b-named composers. nothing too in your face, nothing to tchaikovsky grandiose and sweeping. on the other hand, I was recently at a coffee shop (st. marks) which played neko case followed by edith piaf - I was in heaven. radio alternative is not an option. I'll walk out, I swear.

the coffee shop I'm working in now is cracking me up. the baristas are pretty punked out (pink hair, wallet chains, t-shirts with skulls), and the music... madonna, marvin gaye, that old 80's song from top gun, prince... every time a new song comes on I have to suppress a smile. the cuff doesn't quite match the collar, so to speak.

then again... who doesn't like madonna?

manos

last night I went to the closing of an exhibition that was called, I think, manos. it consisted of boards which were mounted with old, old, old rocks (yes, rocks) that had been used once as tools for grinding and perhaps other things but I don't know what things, and then writing instruments (pens of some kind or other) and then poems between them, written with said writing instrument. I can't say much about the poems because honestly most of them were illegible (which honestly, I liked) but I can say that I put my hands up to the old rocks and imagined, for a moment, that the impression of the labor of the women who had been grinding day after day, generation after generation, was sucked up into my hand and travelled up my arm and wanted to get far into my body. like I always do when it seems as though the sad dead want into my body, I say "shhh and go" but this is a hard thing to do in public, so I just said "shhh" and blew softly into my hand as if to let go of all of their hard days for them, as if as if, all of their broken and hard hands whispered away.

joking

so, this past week I attended the state book awards ceremony, an affair much like a wedding with prizes. anyway, one of the winners of such a prize, the winner of the nonfiction award (I think), read from her new award winning book. she read a passage about finding oneself or finding one's vocation, and in this passage she wrote about a teacher who taught her about rocks. this teacher said of one particular rock, "this one should be in a pageant." I loved it. it was the only thing I loved in the award winning passage. this woman talking about a rock as if it were a beauty queen. the audience laughed. she mocked the woman. the audience laughed. she mitigated her mockery with a comment about how at least she had passion. the audience laughed. I didn't laugh. I loved her. and I wondered why all this laughing, why affirm the obvious which is that rocks do not hold beauty pageants? I don't know. but I knew I couldn't laugh without turning something inside out. so I didn't. that's all.

lonely

sometimes I think that being in one room while people laugh in a nearby room is one of the loneliest feelings in the world. you cannot laugh, are not invited to laugh. if you can hear the conversation around what they are laughing about, maybe you don't even think it's funny. that's another exclusion. or maybe you do think it's funny, and start to laugh, but stop yourself because it seems a little bit like eating someone else's dinner.

other days you laugh and it's no big deal that you're in the other room. you laugh as a subversion, like singing loudly in your car to pop music when you know the guy in the suv beside you is totally watching you rock out. you laugh even when the people in the other room have stopped laughing. you laugh yourself to sleep.

to the ladies false as the gorgeous poem

is a line from lisa robertson's _the men_; I underlined it not because I think badly of the elegant ladies but because there is an indictment here of the elegant poem. a fine poem. a fancy poem.

(on another note, I never really liked the word "ladies" (laddies, I like). ladies drink tea in lieu of coffee, ladies handwash their hose and hang them delicately up to dry, ladies do their hair every morning, ladies go to cocktail bars where men in button up shirts say, "hello ladies" and they smile.)

nope. I don't want to be a lady. or a writer of gorgeous poems. or I do want to be a writer of gorgeous poems but what I have to understand is that what is really gorgeous requires the profane. I don't want to write a "lady" poem. Oh! a lady poem! that sounds awful. I want to pull my poem out of the earth and let the mud slough off.

Lately (after D)

I listen to Kathleen Battle but would rather listen to Maria Callas, whose cd I can't find.

I eat couscous in honor of summertime.

The afternoons fill with storm.

Flowers in the park are huge and red and having bloomed.

My moods swing like fists in a ring.

I've become a lover of Norwegian humor (Elling!).

Writing is strange- is a stranger.

Nighttime visages I bring with me from dreams and misplace into my bedroom.

I'm glacially rereading Middlemarch.

My new neighbor walks around naked and invites a girl over who is also naked. They do things.

Fear and Trembling.

Children chase yellow busses; yellow busses chase children.

going to a town

that is this town that is the town that rufus wainwright played in just blocks from my apartment two nights ago after which I have not stopped singing in my head and out loud his exuberant or melancholy or exuberantly melancholy songs. I think something broke open inside me that night and has stayed broken open. I feel all raw inside.

in other news, I read yesterday that there was a tornado in brooklyn. I hope people and people's houses and cars and my favorite taco stand are okay. also, and does a body need to say it? how surreal. really - it puts the elder french to shame.

oh I am delinquent

and that is a sad thing.

from Rilke's Letters on Cezanne

Ah, we compute the years and divide them here and there and stop and begin and hesitate between the two. But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature, and all we basically have to do is to _be there_, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

sounds and the city

I don't think I'd notice it so much if those sounds which penetrated my apartment walls weren't so often siren sounds or fighting sounds or the beejees. the other night I wake up to a woman yelling "and you don't think I know you want to fuck me?!" and then this afternoon a woman yells "fuck you fuck your lazy ass" neither of which are pretty things to say and now a man sings along to disco songs of the late 70s which he will soon exchange for contemporary country.

don't get me wrong: I like living in a place with people and things; I'm not looking to go all hermity. but it's funny to me that it seems the more people there are in a space, the less they seem to care how they affect it. okay, okay. I'm generalizing and overstating. still, why can't people yell, "Happiness! Happiness!" or "you are beautiful as pictures!" nope. they yell about ugliness and fucking and it carries into my window I keep open for the breeze and my heart gets filled up with their sadness. but then, maybe that's how it's supposed to be; all this sharing of sadnesses. otherwise we'd have to bear it alone.

The Trinity was born
from what we know
of the bitter

symbiosis of couples.
Can we reduce echo's sadness
by synchronizing our speeches?

- R.A.

zs

it's fast approaching midnight and sleep hasn't even begun whispering its sleepy hints to me, a side-effect of the fact that I no longer slumber through the night but like an infant wake up wailing through the walls.

well, okay, not wailing, but coughing in fits. it's a side effect of last month's infection, I think, that gathered itself into my chest. what this means is I've hardly slept through the night in weeks, so I find myself sleeping days, which makes me in turn unable to fall asleep, and then finally falling asleep, unable to stay there.

I dislike it.